I was trying to work out how to edit overlapping spiro paths in Inkscape 1.1 to create the appearance of the paths being intertwined, or passing behind and in front of each other at different points.

I tried masking and clipping but they had too many issues, including several Inkscape crashes.

It would have been easy if I had converted the paths to bitmaps, but I wanted to keep everything as vectors for scalability.

Eventually I found this method involving repeated path duplication with boolean intersections and differences. It seems to get the job done, but it's not perfect. I would love to know if there is a better way to create this effect.

Note that the spiro paths were created with the Pen tool, using fill but without any stroke.

This is the result I ended up with:

I made a very basic slideshow video of the method being used. It's just a series of still images displayed for 3 seconds each, without any sound. For some reason embedding YouTube videos isn't working, so this is the link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmYZ6HXxt88